When Javelin Met Petrus

What happens when an unstoppable Javelin meets an immovable Petrus? Those are the Secret Service code names Mitt Romney, who won the Illinois primary Tuesday, and Rick Santorum have chosen for themselves. Petrus means rock, and invokes an exchange in the Bible between Jesus and Peter (“thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church…”); Santorum told reporters that he picked it because it was his grandfather Pietro’s name in Latin and also because of the rock thing. And why Javelin? “Perhaps ‘Javelin’ is a reference to the sixties muscle car made by American Motors Corporation, the company once run by George Romney,” Marc Ambinder wrote, in a post for GQ, which reported the code names first. Romney did say, in the same speech in which he talked about how “the trees are the right height” in Michigan, that in his youth “If you showed me one square foot of almost any part of a car I could tell you what brand it was, the model and so forth.” Sounds like the sort of hobby Mitt would master.

But still: why would he symbolically portray himself as an object that goes wherever others throw it, with no motoring mind of its own and a tendency to shift direction in a strong wind? Or maybe Javelin is an homage to Kennedy, whose code name was Lancer. (Obama, by the way, is Renegade; George W. Bush was Trailblazer; Dick Cheney was Angler; and Karenna Gore, inimitably, was Smurfette. Coming up with the perfect Secret Service code name is almost as fun as figuring out which gadget a politician is most like).

And what kind of rock does Santorum expect to be, and for whom? On Tuesday, he attended a sermon in Greenwell Springs, Louisiana, at which the Reverend Dennis Terry preached:

I don’t care what the naysayers say. This nation was founded as a Christian nation. The god of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. There is only one God. There is only one God, and his name is Jesus. I’m tired of people telling me that I can’t say those words. I’m tired of people telling us as Christians that we can’t voice our beliefs or we can’t no longer pray in public. Listen to me. If you don’t love America, and you don’t like the way we do things, I’ve got one thing to say, get out!…We don’t worship Buddha, we don’t worship Mohammed, we don’t worship Allah. We worship God. We worship God’s son Jesus Christ.

Who are the “naysayers” here? The man saying no to this country’s values and history, as well as to millions of its citizens, is the one shouting, “Get out.” As for Santorum, he stood there and reportedly cheered at the end. Later, when reporters asked him what he agreed and disagreed with, he answered with a line about his support for “freedom of religion,” bolstered on either side by some rambling evasions: “I do remember him saying that, I said, well, I wasn’t quite sure he was saying it for himself, I wasn’t quite listening to everything to be honest with you. But I wasn’t sure whether he was speaking for himself or speaking generally, but I didn’t clap when he said that because it’s not how I feel.”

And so we have a wobbly javelin, a prickly rock, and a primary in Illinois tonight. Maybe, by the time all of the votes in Illinois are counted, he’ll have won decisively enough to scare at least one of the others away. Or maybe Mitt the inevitable, if not unstoppable, will continue to run up against not only Santorum but also Newt Gingrich (is there a code name for something both squishy and clingy?) and Ron Paul (“Gold bug” is too obvious; maybe “Tesla Coil,” or some sort of electrified squiggle). What’s the solution to the physics problem created when they all meet? Maybe, down in Tampa, an open convention.

Photograph by Damon Winter/The New York Times/Redux.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.